20 July 2007, Friday

(*) … err, “Who Checks the Checkers”? Luckily, it’s a dead language, which means there’s no one to make me write this a hundred times correctly :)

Checkers has been solved, the best a perfect play can achieve is a draw game. Now I’m waiting for the xkcd strip about it :)

In other news, we will soon (July 23 and 24) be able to witness a much harder battle between Man and Machine than the Deep Blue one. The way they remove luck as a factor is neat.

The poker challenge isn’t as significant in the public imagination as IBM Deep Blue’s victory over world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, but it’s more significant in terms of artificial intelligence science, Schaeffer says.

Chess has proven to be a much easier game for computers to play than poker because all the chess pieces are on the board and there are no unknowns. In poker, you don’t know your opponents’ cards, so you must make your decision based on imperfect knowledge.

“Poker is a much better representative of real-world situations with imperfect information, negotiation, bluffing and misrepresentation,” Schaeffer says. “This makes it much more interesting. From a scientific point of view, it’s a harder problem because of that.”